Back Story 3: Liberal versus Republican Debate

The Spring of my senior year, Austin and a couple of other students decided to revive the charter for the Calvin College Democrats. The chapter had not been active since my involvement in it my freshman year.

A lot of people were happy to see the chapter re-started, and the initial meetings were filled with a lot of people. Austin cleverly avoided referring to the group solely as the “Calvin Democrats” but called it “Liberals and Democrats” which appealed to a lot of people, such as myself, who had become disillusioned with the mainstream Democratic Party.

However, like all new clubs and activities, after an initial burst of enthusiasm, the clubs members soon thinned out, and pretty soon the club meetings began to consist only of Austin, Bork, myself, and Giessel. Yes, Giessel, the head of Calvin Republicans.

Giessel liked to keep an eye on what the liberals were up to, so from the first meeting of the club he had one of the best attendance records. But to his credit, he was not one of those people who enjoys screaming at the other side. He behaved himself very well, was extremely polite and welcoming to the new group, and proposed several ideas for increased dialogue on campus between the left and right. One of his ideas was to begin an annual debate between the Campus Republicans and the campus liberals.

As this Chimes article indicates, we liberals more or less got our collective asses kicked on this one, but it wasn’t completely our fault. A large part of it was just that we didn’t know what we were getting into.

Giessel and the Republicans had proposed the debate, and decided the format. Also the moderator was one of the Calvin Republicans. I don’t think they were trying to gain an unfair advantage, but they had a clear idea of what was going to happen, and we didn’t. Giessel tried to explain it to us. “It’s just like the format of the ‘Larry King Show,’” he said. I nodded my head like I understood, but I don’t think I had ever watched the “Larry King Show.”

And it certainly didn’t help our cause any that we allowed Giessel to sit in on all our planning meetings. Again, I don’t think he was trying to gain an unfair advantage; he had just gotten into the habit of coming to all of the “Calvin Liberals” meetings. Ordinarily this was no problem, but when we were discussing our strategy in the debate against him, maybe someone should have suggested it was inappropriate to have him there. I guess we were just too polite. It was a bit bizarre though. Since the meetings were just me, Bork, Austin, and Giessel, it wasn’t like Giessel exactly blended into the crowd. We just more or less pretended he wasn’t there for an hour and a half while we discussed things like what our response would be if the topic of abortion came up, and how we planned to avoid being pigeon holed as big government, and there was Giessel sitting in the whole time absorbing our whole strategy. And that was the only planning meeting we had.

Giessel was going to represent the Republican side, and Austin agreed to represent the Liberals, but reluctantly. Austin was very nervous about getting up on stage all alone, and so insisted Bork and I come up with him for support. The plan was we would sit up on the stage with him and help him prepare his responses to Giessel.

Now I (and I think Austin also) had envisioned something like this: There is a Republican table, and a Liberal table. Giessel is up on stage talking, and Austin, Bork, and I are sitting at the liberal table. I’m scribbling down notes or something, leaning over to whisper something to Austin, or pointing out to him some statistics he can use. Then, Giessel’s time is up, I thrust some papers into Austin’s hand, and he gets a chance to go up and take the microphone and give his response.

But in actuality, the debate functioned more like a free flowing conversation. Giessel and Austin did not give point and counter-point responses like a high school debate team, instead they were more or less just behind their podium talking to each other in sound bites or sentences. Someone would say something, and then the other one would immediately respond to it. There was no down time to discuss strategy with Austin. In fact there wasn’t even a “liberal” table like I had envisioned. La Grand and I (Bork ended up not being able to make it) sat in chairs behind Austin’s podium. I would be flipping through my files and writing down things on paper, and then standing up to hand Austin something, but it was a very unsmooth process. Austin would have to stop whatever he was talking about, take a minute to read what I had written, and then stammer to try and remember what he had been talking about. After the debate Austin told me that I had helped him out a lot, but at the time I got the impression that I was doing nothing more than disrupting his chain of thought. Worse, it made things look like the 3 of us together on the liberal side were no match for Giessel by himself on the Republican side.

The other thing that none of us on the liberal side really understood is that the nature of the debate would just follow wherever the conversation led. For instance I had come prepared with statistics on just about every topic just in case the debate would veer into those areas. Giessel, on the other hand, had come prepared with topics he wanted to steer the debate into. He had even brought props with him. At one point to illustrate the necessity of more funding for the military he took a slide ruler out of his pocket and said, “This is what is being used to design our fighter planes. This is all the technology our military can afford.” I flipped through my files, but I had no figures on slide ruler usage in the military, and it was one of Giessel’s many points we had to let through unopposed. We had come totally on the defensive, with no talking points of our own.

In talking with the Chimes reporter afterwards, I did my best to be gracious and acknowledged that Giessel, to his credit, had done very well as a one man team against the three of us. And although I’m not directly quoted, I think the Chimes analysis of the 3-part team doing more harm than good also came from my comments to the reporter.

I think the fellow liberals in the crowd were pretty disappointed by our performance (again, this comes through in the article). I was sorry we had let them down. I’m not sure how the debate went in following years, or if the liberal team did any better in the years following.